Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 July 1886 — Is the Earth Drying Up? [ARTICLE]

Is the Earth Drying Up?

Physicists and scientists say that the amount of water on the surface of the globe is steadily decreasing, and that the land gains on the sea year by year. It is quite true that in some portions of the globe the sea is eating up, as it were, the land. This is true of the Atlantic coast, which gives evidence of a steady encroachment of the ocean upon its shores. New York will some day be a city under the sea, and its great bridge and ruins can be examined and disinterred only by means of diving bells. Geography tells us that two-thirds of the earth’s surface is composed of water, so we can afford to lose a good deal of that element without suffering. If the nebular’hypothesis is correct, and the earth was once a vast sea of fire, water was then non-existent, and when it first appeared, must have come in the form of steam. Life was not possible until the fluid cooled, and it must have been myriads of years before the great salt seas formed. If the earth should gradually lose its moisture, great changes will be effected. There will be more land and a denser population, fewer marine animals, and more room for the races which now inhabit the land. Certain districts will become ttrid, swamps will dry up, vast waterways will be converted into dry land. "What a pity it is we cannot go to sleep for a thousand years, so as to see what kind of a world this will be in the year 3000. There will, we apprehend. be some water left even then.